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Han Shaogong: A Dictionary of Maqiao

beer good

Well-Known Member
A Dictionary of Maqiao, Han Shaogong (1995)

Having a sense of humour doesn't mean being able to tell jokes. Humour is the ability to play with the expected. Which is never more apparent than when authority tries to tell people what to think.

In 1970, the young intellectual student Han Shaogong was sent to the tiny village of Maqiao, where not much has changed since the emperor's days. But this was the cultural revolution and everything was to be made new: city-dwelling weaklings would become good workers, and in the process help turn the farmers into good socialists. So when he's not working the fields or the mountains, Han gets to teach the farmers to recite Mao quotes in proper, modern Chinese. But of course, to do that he first needs to understand their dialect, which isn't easy - you'd think the whole village was speaking backwards! "Awake" means "stupid", "expensive" means "young", "respect" means "punish", "hick" means "city boy", "democracy" means "chaos"... woops, sorry, some of those are modern Chinese. But anyway.

25 years later Han has grown to an accomplished novelist and puts together this fiction about life in Maqiao (any similarity between that name and Macondo is surely a coincidence) before, during and after his visit, in a form he's borrowed from Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A dictionary of the Maqiao dialect, where every chapter heading is a different word he needs to explain, at once making up a part of the ongoing story and an explanation for why that particular word has that particular meaning in this particular place. And of course, he doesn't present it all in alphabetical order like a proper dictionary; alphabets - especially the Chinese one, where words can be spelled several different ways, each of which gives them a different meaning - are arbitrary, after all. So instead he arranges them in a different order, to tell a very entertaining story of the people who make up the village, full of serious gallows humour and with an amazing cast of characters - none of which seem to fit neatly into the categories his standardised Maoist vocabulary tells him they belong to. And 25 years later, as a Chinese intellectual with his head full of Western books, he can't help but draw parallels between his outsider status then, and the different but similar one he faces today.
In 1986 I visited an "artists' colony" in Virginia, USA; that is, a center for artistic creation. The word "colony" kept making me uncomfortable. Only later did I realize that many Westerners in countries that used to have a large number of colonies don't associate the word with murder, fires, rape, plunder, opium smuggling and other things that the people in former colonies think about when they hear it. [To them] the colony is an outpost for the noble, a field camp for heroes.
...says the man who was sent to the countryside to teach them how to think in a new age. All words, all concepts, mean different things depending on by whom, when, where and how they're spoken. What starts in a small village in inner China becomes a cross-section of the world where battles are increasingly fought with words and ideologies rather than brute force - defeating someone is one thing, changing their minds is another, even Mao knew that. And as burlesque, angry, sentimental or hilarious the stories of the hicks... sorry, that word doesn't work here... in Maqiao get, the subtext of how we control and are controlled by language runs through everything in a way that's both very similar to and completely different from what a writer like Herta Müller does. Orwell was wrong; Big Brother's doublethink will always, through usage, be knowingly or accidentally subverted into triplethink.

A Dictionary of Maqiao, as a deconstruction of the idea of ideological revolution (whether Maoist or capitalist) imposed from outside, knows better than to offer simple problems or solutions. Instead Han creates a very entertaining chronicle where both the characters and the underlying themes float like a river of rice gruel, blood, sweat and shit, always leaving new layers of sediment and breaking through every attempt to dam it, yet always clear enough to see the bottom and calm enough to reflect the person reading it.

:star4:+
 
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